I was challenged to create my very own zine, aka. my own small budget, self written, self designed, and self printed “fan-magazine”. The zine must be about books and my own interest in them. The course manual requires the following elements in terms of subject matter:

• Introduce yourself

• Your creative process

• Looking at books

• Global influences

• The future of the book

• How can you creatively respond to one or more of the following book related sayings – “Bookworms”, “A closed/ open book”, “the oldest trick in the book”, “you cant judge a book by its cover”, “in someone’s good/bad books”, or “by the book”.

These are the subjects from Part One of this section of the course. What I will have to do is take what I did there and summarize as best I can, while also creating an interesting zine design.

My general approach to this project is this: to make small publication of the highest quality I am capable, with the subject matter and tools that I have available to me. All the while, thinking of the fact that if this were a zine I would really sell, it would need to be printed multiple times, either with my home printer, or preferably at the local print shop.

The integrity of the “low-fi” element required for the aesthetic of a zine will be kept intact because there is no way that I could make a publication that looks anything but made by an amateur. But I will not be using cutting and pasting techniques. This is mostly because I do have higher quality digital tools that are available to me and which I find comfortable to use, and therefore do not need to resort to pasting and photocopying, as they did when such tools were not as widely available as they are now.

I suppose I could create a zine with more old-fashioned techniques in mind. I would need to up my collaging skills quite a bit though, and I do not feel it would be true to me, which is the more important thing. Central to the zine and zine culture is the element of self-expression, and I don’t think the cut and paste technique would achieve that for me. But illustration would! And therefore I will include illustrations in my little zine.

As in all my projects, the first thing I did was go to my sketchbook to jot my thoughts down and make some small sketches. I wrote down all the elements I knew I had to include, and some thoughts regarding those such as the number of pages and sections I would need to have, how much I wanted to dedicate to each section, etc. I also considered that this zine is essentially about me and what I think about books and book design, and while ME is not my favorite subject, I wanted the zine design to reflect the fact that I am an illustrator since that is what I consider myself to be. I briefly debated the idea of making an “artzine” which is exactly what it sounds like, just a small publication showcasing an artist’s or multiple artists’ work. But I dropped the idea because I would need to include quite a bit of text that is on a completely different subject than the art showcased.

Next, I started to brainstorm binding methods and size. Size was the one that was easiest to settle on because I planned to print the zine at home and I determined that the least headache-inducing way to do that would be to make it in A5. Then I could just print things out on the A4 printer paper and fold. But I also played around with the idea of creating something more postcard-like and not bind anything at all, just put the images in an envelope. Other ideas included spiral binding, perforating and tying with string or ribbon and changing the standard portrait layout to a landscape. In the end, I chose to bind it like I bound the mock up from the exercises in Part One. I would simply sow it with needle and thread and then glue the cover to hide the string. I thought this method would be appropriate because it is the most common way books are bound, and since the zine is all about books the approach felt right.

Once I knew how I would bind the zine and what size it would have, I could plan the layout. I wanted to keep with the theme of a traditional book in zine form, so I planned for front and back covers, end pages for each side (either blank or with a pattern), a title  page, a The End page, and a double page spread for each of the subjects in bullet-points above, making six two-page spreads, and an additional spread for a “Conclusion” section at the end.

The next step was the mock up. I folded the appropriate number of printer pages, bound them together, glued a “cover” using yet another printer page and started planning straight on the mock-up. I drew a cover image with the “Of Bookin'” title, which I thought was charming, but I ended up using the project name I had in the sketchbook “Book Thoughts”.  I made sure to sketch something for each spread, or preferably for each page. I changed all of the subject names given in the handbook, and separated some in two. “Introduce Yourself”, I changed to “Why Book Design?” and “Who am I?”. “Your Creative Process” I changed to “How I work now” and “How I Hope to Improve”. “Looking at books”  I changed to “Six Books I Care About”. “Global Influences” I changed to “Six Influential Books in the Same Genera”. “The Future of the Book” I changed to “What is my take on the Future of the Book?”.  And the last point I named “My Own Little Book Experiment”. I also created a conclusion spread with a bit of text on the left and a full illustration on the right, the only page which has a full illustration instead of just a small element.

The next step was to bring everything in Photoshop, where I would be refining my initial sketches and writing and designing the pages. I photographed each page, then transferred the pages on an A4 canvas in Photoshop. Some sketches I needed to cut up and reposition for the sake of composition.

After positioning everything just right, I lowered the opacity on the photographs and sketched in more detail over them using a simple black ink brush. I obviously would not be able to include any color because my printer does not use color, and because if I would print this in multiple copies at a print shop, I would like not to pay extra for the color, especially considering that color is not even necessary.

The drawings themselves are mostly of a single character who takes the reader through the book, creating a bit of a story-like progression. And since the book is about me I made her resemble me a little bit. At this point, I also included the titles, in a font called “century schoolbook”. I chose that font because it looks a little bit like typewriting or a classic “book font”. I’m sure those fonts have some sort of name, but I don’t know it. Again, I kept up with using elements of a traditional book.

After the second sketch layer, which I used to better define my ideas, I created a third layer over each sketch, this time inking them properly and shading slightly in order to give more texture and dimension to the drawings. Then,  I took some time to write out the text for each page and to properly position everything (with very wide margins, because my printer does not do things very precisely).

As a nod to the more traditional zines, instead of typing out all of the text, I used the stylus brush to jot down some notes and to number the pages.

The layout was finished, but in order to print, I had to settle pagination. This was just a little stressful, because as much as I understood the principle, practice is very different from theory, and I had no idea how things would come out of the printer. But I persevered and tried to not overthink how things worked too much. The best way I can explain the process is like this: I laid out all of the pages in the order they would appear when read, then paired them up from the ends inward. As in, the book covers are paired together, the Title page and The End page are paired together, page 1 goes with page 14, page 2 goes with page 13 and so on and so forth.

I achieved all of this in Illustrator, because I needed two spreads in each PDF document so that I could print them recto and verso.

The first printing attempt came out relatively successful, technical issues with the printer, and issues regarding the size of printable documents aside. The pages came out looking clear and centered, and I was easily able to fold and bind them. However, the fact that the glue I had available to me was very wet made for a very wrinkled zine, so on the second attempt, I decided to entirely forego the idea of using glue and simply put the patterned end pages on the verso of the book covers and bind it like that even if the string would show. This came out looking much neater and was bound faster. This would be a plus if I were to make this multiple times. On the second attempt, I also learned how to make the PDF documents smaller without sacrificing image quality, which resulted in a quicker printing process.

This was one of the more ambitious projects I have made, and I learned so much doing it! Not only about zines, but also about the arduous process of conceiving the ideas and then having to think of how they would work in a real-life scenario, then really having to apply those things to make the project happen. I also learned a lot about printing and about how books (or magazines, I suppose) are made. Now I feel that I have at least a starting point of a concept regarding what goes into printing something.

One thing that I would definitely change is the program I used when illustrating and writing the text. I did everything in a single Photoshop document, all the illustrations for all the pages, and all the text. This resulted in some massive Jpeg images and then in some equally huge PDF’s, which made printing very slow and probably slowed down my process when creating the spreads themselves. Next time, I will illustrate everything separately, then put things together in Adobe InDesign. I did not use InDesign now because I had never used before, but I think I would have saved myself a lot of time and frustration if I had spent an hour familiarizing myself with the program, then making the zine there.

All in all, however, creating the zine was a great experience! Perhaps next time I make a zine, it will be that artzine I was thinking about at the beginning. That would be a bit of a different challenge. An area I really see myself applying this though is making mockups for children’s books. Perhaps that is a good concept for my next big project.